Beat Detective Tutorial Video Part One is Here!!

[digitaldeath]

Nah not happening. I have officially denounced Beat Detective for drum editing. I did a super technical death metal track on Thursday, almost 9 hours with Beat Detective (240bpm 16th notes everywhere). I opened it up in Reaper last night to try the Joey-style slip editing method, took me 2 hours and I did the entire track and it sounds better too.

So now I am a Pro Tools user who uses Reaper just for drum editing, how backwards does that seem?

Maybe I'll do a Reaper slip editing tutorial though.

What happened? I thought BD was a godsend for you Adam?

 

[AdamWathan]

What happened? I thought BD was a godsend for you Adam?

BD is WAY better than chop+quantize in Reaper, but the whole slip editing concept to me is brilliant, as soon as I read about it I felt like an idiot for not coming up with it myself.

Beat Detective is still great, especially for simpler stuff. But honestly, in the amount of time it takes for me to zoom in, highlight from transient to transient for a section, zoom out so I can see the whole section comfortable, open Beat Detective, type in the bar|beat locations, mess with sensitivity slider to get the right hits, zoom back in and scroll through to make sure the trigger times are correct, separate, conform and fill, I could've done twice as many hits manually one hit at a time using the slip method.

Honestly, with the one simple macro I set up, all I have to do is hit s, then click and drag the audio to where it's supposed to be, s, drag, s, drag, s, drag. It's UNREAL how fast it is and it sounds flawless.

With Beat Detective, doing something like I was last week at 240bpm loaded with 16ths is a nightmare. Because a 16th note at 240bpm is such a tiny period of time compared to 8ths or anything at a lower tempo, the drummer has to be almost INHUMAN tight in order for Beat Detective to quantize every hit to the right grid line automatically. A 16th note at 240bpm is less than 63 milliseconds. So if the drummer is ever off by more than 30ms in either direction, it is going to get quantized to the wrong note. I was having trouble with a lot of blasts where the snare is on the "e" and "a" of the beat because beat detective would move half of them to the right place and the other half would be on the "1" and "and" because of that 30ms tolerance being exceeded. So I had to manually type in the trigger times for half of the hits. It's 100% accurate and sounds great, and you have tons of control, but it is SLOW AS HELL COMPARED to slip editing. It is still the fastest and most accurate system for actually chopping and quantizing things, but the slip method is not really "quantizing", you are moving every hit by hand and eyeballing them to the grid.


I will make a video today if I have a chance. It is the easiest drum editing method ever, period. I am almost considering switching to Cubase from Pro Tools just because of it. I can do it in Reaper, but Reaper is still a piece of shit from an editing standpoint :/

 

[digitaldeath]

Cool man, I'd love to see a vid explaining what you mean.
Where did you read about it and does it still sound as good as Beat Detective?

 

[AdamWathan]

Reaper Slip Editing tutorial...

http://www.adamwathan.com/tutorials/reaperslipedit.mov

Still uploading, it's like 240mb.

 

[AdamWathan]

Cool man, I'd love to see a vid explaining what you mean.
Where did you read about it and does it still sound as good as Beat Detective?

It sounds exactly the same if you are being meticulous with both methods. You have total control over everything and the end result is exactly the same as the end result with Beat Detective, all the hits are on the grid and there is a crossfade before each hit. It's wonderful really dude, I edit drums for fun now just because it's so relaxing in Reaper

 

[digitaldeath]

It sounds exactly the same if you are being meticulous with both methods. You have total control over everything and the end result is exactly the same as the end result with Beat Detective, all the hits are on the grid and there is a crossfade before each hit. It's wonderful really dude, I edit drums for fun now just because it's so relaxing in Reaper

Really? Cuz I always found editing in Reaper to be a pain!

 

[AdamWathan]

Really? Cuz I always found editing in Reaper to be a pain!

Watch the tutorial vid I posted and be amazed!

 

[C_F_H_13]

great videos guys (both adam and greyskull). Please don't take any offence when I say this though, I feel both of you are taking the long way around things a lot of the time. I might have to make my own BD video at some point, because I feel there is a few steps that can be greatly simplified.

 

[greyskull]

there was a lot of faffing, im not gonna lie.
Funily enough making that video has made me examine my work flow in B.D
Boy am i faster than ever now!
id be quicker if Digideavid fixed the edit selection bug, and managed to make the fades a decent speed again.. They slowed down to g4 speeds after the PT8 update.

 

[AdamWathan]

great videos guys (both adam and greyskull). Please don't take any offence when I say this though, I feel both of you are taking the long way around things a lot of the time. I might have to make my own BD video at some point, because I feel there is a few steps that can be greatly simplified.

Hey man, very interested in how you would speed up the workflow in the slip editing video (unless you are referring to my BD video from the other thread that isn't linked here)... Regardless, another BD tutorial would be awesome, always interested in ways to speed up the editing!

 

[C_F_H_13]

Hey man, very interested in how you would speed up the workflow in the slip editing video (unless you are referring to my BD video from the other thread that isn't linked here)... Regardless, another BD tutorial would be awesome, always interested in ways to speed up the editing!

I was refering to your BD video, but I'm pretty impressed with the Reaper slip thing. I have a similar macro in PT I use (part of it is in my quickeys tutorial in the equipment section). I'll have to watch your video a bit more (slip) and see if I can turn my macro into something similar in PT.

Thanks for the inspiration.

 

[darthjujuu]

i wonder how joey's workflow has changed. o_0

i really can't see how editing in reaper is any different or less powerful than in PT, apart from obviously a lack of beatdetective and the transient marker elastic audio engine. i find it super intuitive, being a user of both.

 

[AdamWathan]

i wonder how joey's workflow has changed. o_0

i really can't see how editing in reaper is any different or less powerful than in PT, apart from obviously a lack of beatdetective and the transient marker elastic audio engine. i find it super intuitive, being a user of both.

Dude are you crazy? You can't even copy and paste things properly in Reaper. The overlap behaviour is absolutely insane and makes no sense. In Pro Tools, if I paste something over top of something else, it replaces it. In Reaper, it will either crossfade them, play both at the same time, or only play the OLD region I was trying to paste over top of depending on how I set the preferences.

It is IMPOSSIBLE to drag something from the left onto an item on the right and have it play the complete left item and cut the start off of the right item. You have to manually trim both regions, it's absurd. There is also NO track based edit grouping, so I can't edit all my drums at once without explicitly grouping the drum items together after every punch in... I need to make a video about why editing in Reaper is ridiculous.

 

[digitaldeath]

Dude are you crazy? You can't even copy and paste things properly in Reaper. The overlap behaviour is absolutely insane and makes no sense. In Pro Tools, if I paste something over top of something else, it replaces it. In Reaper, it will either crossfade them, play both at the same time, or only play the OLD region I was trying to paste over top of depending on how I set the preferences.

It is IMPOSSIBLE to drag something from the left onto an item on the right and have it play the complete left item and cut the start off of the right item. You have to manually trim both regions, it's absurd. There is also NO track based edit grouping, so I can't edit all my drums at once without explicitly grouping the drum items together after every punch in... I need to make a video about why editing in Reaper is ridiculous.

No video required Adam. Those who have done some proper editing in Reaper are well aware of these problems.
I mean, how long does it take Justin & Co. to implement these features? Instead, they work on stupid little features that no one really needs...!
Sigh!

I think the best thing we can do is to put the following links in our sigs and make people vote on them!

http://forum.cockos.com/project.php?issueid=122
http://forum.cockos.com/project.php?issueid=1256
http://forum.cockos.com/project.php?issueid=843

 

[AdamWathan]

Done, haha...

 

[digitaldeath]

Done, haha...

Same here!

 

[darthjujuu]

haha alright fair enough, i guess it takes being a native PT guy and then switching back to reaper to notice these things. I only recently started out in PT so i never developed a dependency. but i must say, a replica of the protools track hide/show and grouping window would be a godsend.

 

[darthjujuu]

that video was phenomenal. i'm shocked that this isn't a more mainstream method, since joey's been doing it cubendo forever

 

[darthjujuu]

it's probably also worth mentioning that joey uses the windows integrated keylock feature (sticky keys, i think) to clamp down alt automatically so you don't need deadweight a finger on there, or a chess piece, or anything else of that nature. haha

 

[Kevolicious]

I'm having trouble with the grouping and seperating..

I have the kick, snare top, and toms 1 & 2 grouped like you had, but BD isn't marking any of the transients except for the kick track in the selection, so I can't seperate the regions. I'm kind of fumbling on the terminology, but does anyone understand my issue?